A Christmas bar brawl that DCI officers turned into robbery with violence charge

Stanslaus Mwanzia, 22, is cooling his heels at Shimo la Tewa Prison in Mombasa, after he was arrested from a bar in Changamwe on Christmas Day, last year. Two days later, on December 27, 2024, he was charged with violent robbery. The complainant is Gerald Kanyithia M’ituru, a DCI detective based in Mombasa.

The charge sheet does not indicate where the robbery took place, or even what Mwanzia allegedly stole from M’ituru. He was allegedly “armed with dangerous weapons namely wooden clubs and beer bottles.”

The latter arsenal is the closest we get to approximate what happened on that day, as Mwanzia was in a bar when a brawl broke out, reportedly over a woman who works in the same establishment, and who is listed as a witness. All the other witnesses are DCI officers who were with the complainant.

I don’t know if the officers were on duty when they went out drinking—that fact can only emerge from the investigating officer. That, too, will be a police officer, so police will have the onerous task of undertaking an impartial investigation against their own.

I don’t know either if sanctions are available against police who abuse their power by turning a bar brawl into a capital offence. All I know is that neither Mwanzia, nor his family, planned to spend the New Year encumbered by anxieties of surviving Shimo la Tewa, while awaiting the wheels of justice to turn.

Mwanzia is not the only victim of the system—there are far too many cases of Kenyans left holding the short end of the stick—not just because the law is an ass, but because the court system is routinely abused to the disadvantage of the weak.

Out of the many involved in the bar brawl, only Mwanzia has lost his freedom because he couldn’t pay his bail. And this case is possibly too small for the attention of Director of Public Prosecutions, Renson Igonga.

The last time I checked, he was busy discharging Triton suspects over some Sh7 billion case, because witnesses won’t testify, but there are plenty of police officers waiting to testify against Mwanzia for a violent robbery from a bar brawl.